European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker, is deciding whether or not to reorganise Europe’s civil protection service after the response to Portugal’s deadly summer fires was less than swift.
“We will consider, at Portugal’s request, the reorganisation of civil protection in Europe,” Juncker pronounced at a press conference alongside Portugal’s President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
When tragedy strikes, member countries can deploy civil protection aid through equipment and personnel provision, or send ‘experts’ to the field to assess and coordinate things with local management.
In mid-June, 64 people died when forest fires swept the Pedrógão Grande area in central Portugal. This was followed in the middle of October by new fires that killed a further 45 people but the response to each from overseas fire support services, most critically through the provision of firefighting aircraft, was measured in days, not hours.
The Portuguese government has promised to prevent new tragedies by carrying out some fundamental reforms in forest management and firefighting as close to half of all forests burned in the EU in 2016 were in Portugal.
The country is close to breaking its all time record of hectares destroyed in one season but it has been the number of corpses that has triggered a political response after years of underinvestment, poor or ignored rules, suspicion of corruption in private air support services, grounded helicopters and the running of Portugal’s forests on behalf of the pulp industry with little regard for the safety of those that live and work in forested areas.
Juncker was in Portugal on Monday and Tuesday this week and announced that this year’s fires touched him “personally” as “one of my fellow citizens perished in the fires here in Portugal.”
